Any mac support specialists? (Possibly Yorkshire based)

[damiend]

Morning

 

Just a quick one and I'm hoping you can help me here... we have recently started having issues with mac network users not being able to log in sporadically.

 

We are looking for possibly an apple server expert/support company to shed some light on the issues we are having.

 

Does anyone have any good contacts/company names that may be able to offer this kind of support?

 

 

Thanks for any help you can offer.

[Mark182]

These guys are ace. They are an hour away.

[sted]

its worth checking the time on the macs. at least with ad i found (its been a while though) that macs diddnt seem to be very tolerant to time differences setting them to get time from a domain controller rather than apples time server fixed this

[damiend]

Cheers @Mark182 They were high on the list as I have dealt with them before.

 

The errors we are facing as attached... but this is happening randomly to accounts and computers so it hasn't been pinned down to anything specific yet.

 

As a side note, it is a pure open directory server no magic triangle malarky.

 

 

[AntonioRocco]

Not doubting what you're saying but are you sure you're using OD and not AD in some way? I'm asking because the screen grabs looks like your using the server's bonjour name as well as the path to users' homes looking suspiciously like what you'd have in AD, ie: nested folders. A typical OD environment would have very flat paths to users' homes. If you're not using bonjour or you've not based OD around .local then I would expect to see something like hallx-osx.yourdomain.internal/Group203 in the url=smb:// path instead of what you have. Presumably AD is providing DNS & DHCP and the DNS service is not enabled on your mac server?

 

If you have used .local for your internal DNS domain that will explain why users experience the unreliability you see. No real way around this unless you rebuild the domain. If DNS is with AD then that's not a trivial thing to achieve. There are things you can do on the macs to minimise this (altering the mdns timeout value for example) but it won't be a real and lasting fix. If the macs and the OD domain are standalone and not part of the AD environment other than accessing the internet then you can rebuild the mac domain fairly easily and should not cause too much disruption or take as long as it would if it was AD.

 

On a side note that may be of interest, but I'm also an independent Apple Consultant and Systems Engineer of many years experience based in South Yorkshire.

 

Antonio Rocco (ACSA)

[damiend]

Thanks @AntonioRocco

 

We use a different address (hallcross.org) for our internal DNS and have kept our mac server using the .local address and then bound all of our macs to that. Completely standalone from the rest of the network - but on the same network infrastructure as such.

 

We have Jigsaw24 taking a look for us and will report back any findings but may need to call on your assistance so you may hear from me/us soon